When he’s not drawing his comic strip Dilbert, Scott Adams types out his offbeat musings on his blog. In a posting on The Future of Newspapers, Adams offers some predictions for how newspapers will evolve. First off, he foresees the traditional print model ending sometime after most people have upgraded the current cell phones two more times, killed off by the enhanced web browsing features that will soon be de rigueur in all mobile phones. Aside from that, It turns out that many of his predictions have already come true. I initially found his proposal that cell phones come with a “Venetian screen” - a scroll that can be pulled out from a phone to provide a larger canvas to make reading digital text more palatable - somewhat fanciful. But then one of the posting’s comments included a link to a device that does exactly that.

Getting down to the more practical level of what will newspaper content be like, Adams also seizes on a number of elements taking place right now with citizen journalism and news ranking sites like Digg and Reddit. According to Adams, the all-digital newspaper of the future will include:

—Social Voting Hybrid: Instead of just passive aggregating of news according to online votes, actual professionals will edit out “the redundant, the juvenile, and the stuff unsubstantiated by facts.. . with “counterpoints to everything.”

—Ad Deal For Blogs: Bloggers should create a system where newspapers “grab their content any time the newspapers want, move it into the newspaper’s own content model on any given day, surround it with their own ads, and pay the blogger a percentage of ad revenue.”  Some local papers have already started such experiments, with details of one local daily enlisting bloggers for their coverage here. In Europe, commuter daily paper Metro has been trying out bloggers on the payroll is here.

—You, The Editor: Mobile phone readers could have several ways of deciding what kind of newspaper they receive. Parents worried about the media their children are exposed to could have a G-Rated paper, or they could choose extra good news or celebrity news.

—A Few Pros Still Needed: After the future newspaper upgrade, there will still be a place for editors, writers and artists. There just won’t be many places. Massive amounts of consolidation will mean that “there won’t be 3,000 newspapers online. There might be a dozen.” But “hordes” will be hired to manage the technology, edit for quality control, create the art, sell the ads, etc.

The complete end of print papers, even if cell phones come with extendable sheets, will probably take quite a bit longer than two cell phone upgrades. And while newspapers continue to struggle, some of these ideas are being taken seriously, as they should - and it’s especially helpful when the endorsement comes from a source whose living largely depends on being syndicated in roughly 2,000 newspapers.